The awakening of Giancarlo Stanton commenced when the Yankees began their season with a fizzle. Within the first two weeks of his whole new baseball existence in New York, he experienced a season’s worth of extremes: two homers on Opening Day in Toronto, two five-strikeout games in the Bronx, and a lost fly ball in the rain in Boston. In his own ballpark, he was savaged with boos.

“We’re like .500 after 14 games,” Stanton said, recalling when his new reality truly set in. “And it’s like, the world’s going to end.”

Yet, in a strange way, he didn’t mind it. In fact, part of him took it as a good thing. For the first 7 1/2 years of his big league career, he toiled for the Marlins, one of the most dysfunctional franchises in all of sports. No matter what he accomplished, no matter how many mammoth homers he hit, the end result was the same. By August, he was resigned to his Sisyphean sentence, left to push the Home Run Sculpture up a hill, pink...